News > David Cronenberg to Direct Operatic Version of The Fly

Written by David Morgan 

This may or may not be old news but it's certainly the first I've heard of it. David Cronenberg recently had a phone interview with Quint from AICN, in which they talked quite a bit about Eastern Promises, but they also mentioned that Cronenberg is working on an opera version of the director's 1986 classic The Fly. I'll let the Canadian director speak for himself:

Well, it’s not a musical, it’s an opera. It’s a genuine opera. Yeah, I’m directing that and it will be in Paris in July 08 and then it will be in Los Angeles, I think September 08 or maybe August.

Yeah, it’s an interesting experiment for me. Howard [Shore, Cronenberg's frequent collaborator] has written the music and David Henry Wong has written the libretto David wrote M. BUTTERFLY the play and my screenplay and so it’s kind of an interesting coming together on a different project.

The opera is strange. It’s quite different from moviemaking and so I have one week of work in February and then I have four and a half weeks in May/June and that’s it, so I really… although I couldn’t be shooting a movie during that time, I could certainly be prepping one, so I’m looking at various things, but at the moment I don’t have my next film. I don’t know what the next is going to be.

Good idea, bad idea? My outlook tends to be that David Cronenberg can do no wrong. And lately, in particular, he's been on a hot streak. At the very least this will be quite an experiment that some lucky Parisians and Los Angeleans (?) can enjoy.